Now Playing: Mark of the Ninja

I picked this up as part of a Humble Bundle that contained two games I wanted to play; FTL and Fez. I’d never even heard of Mark of the Ninja, yet it’s become the most-played title in the little selection I secured.

It’s a stealth game and I’m not generally a fan of stealth games. My experience of them is creeping through dark corridors in first or third person, waiting an apparent age for a guard to wander over to an area where I think he can’t see or hear me, followed by a cautious move forward revealing he can, in fact see me and then my untimely demise. Repeating this semi-random process ad nauseum does not a fun game make.

But Mark of the Ninja is different. It’s simple shift of the action to a two dimensional platform perspective is a thing of genius, solving all these problems at a stroke. Now I can tell at a glance whether a guard can see me or not, or whether he’ll be able to hear an action I take. This is stealth by strategy and when I fail, I failed because I fucked up.

The result is a weird and compelling blend of puzzling, twitching and sandbox experimentation. Levels and your palette of actions are carefully designed so that there’s more than one solution to most problems. At the most basic level you can usually choose to either sneak past a guard or take him out.

In a more complex scenario you might blind a guard by blowing the light, throw down a trap for him to stumble into hoping his sudden and grisly death will panic his second comrade into accidentally shooting a third. There’s a lot of options in between these extremes too.

I ran through it in about seven hours total and mostly I thought it was novel and rather brilliant. But it started to pale just toward the end. Why?

A mediocre plot didn’t help. Ultimately I think the sandbox aspects of the game don’t work as well as they should because your goals are limited: it all still comes down to creeping past guards or killing them, no matter how many tools you have at your disposal for achieving those aims. But as a stealth game it’s an unparalleled experience.

Matt is a board gamer who plays video games when he can't find anyone similarly obsessive to play against, which is frequently. The inability to get out and play after the birth of his first child lead him to start writing about games as a substitute for playing them. He founded FortressAT.com and writes there and at NoHighScores.com

I loved it when I first played it. They really did nail all those stealth mechanics in 2D, from the visibility and noise levels, to the guard reactions and tools at your disposal. Gotta play it again one of these days and finally check out that Director’s Cut DLC that I got during the last Steam Sale.

Oh, and gotta mention that it made me fall in love with Klei. Enjoyed Don’t Starve immensely and looking forward to playing it again on PS4. Also, can’t wait to try out Incognita/Invisible, Inc – it’s stealth XCOM-like turn based strategy after all, and who wouldn’t like to play that?

I enjoyed the game well enough, but didn’t care for how you could see all the guards on screen, despite them being out of your characters field of view. It makes sneaking past everyone a simple matter of sitting back and watching their movements and then moving through your pre-determined path. I think they gave you the option to play through the game with enemies only within the field of view visible, but you have to beat the game to unlock it, and like you said, by the end, I had very little motivation to keep playing. It really should have been an option from the get go, but oh well, missed opportunity.

FTL and Fez have also gotten little playtime, but I definitely made sure to complete Mark of the Ninja. Yes the story is a bit stale, but the emergent story through gameplay was that I was a cool ninja cruelly playing with dumb guards’ lives like a kitty cat. It is kind of difficult to go back and 100% everything. Having to do everything absolutely perfectly actually makes it less fun. Klei’s best game though.